A new project shows how a basic assortment of carefully selected laboratory equipment can give teaching a boost and widen career options for pharmacy students. Its impacts are reported in a video now available online.

A lack of key laboratory equipment in a number of pharmacy schools, particularly in developing countries, means that students are not able to gain much needed hands-on laboratory experience and this can limit their understanding of pharmacy practice and career choices.

Few would imagine a pharmacy school where the teaching is theory and no practice. But this was the case at the University of Malawi Pharmacy Department until last year. Under the auspices of the FIP UNESCO-UNITWIN programme, however, a solution has been provided: the Lab Box.

Watch the video to see for yourself the big impact that these Lab Boxes have had!

The data explosion will change the world. Around this time last year, the United Nations put together a “data revolution advisory group” to inform the post-2015 Millennium Development Goals debate. Its work culminated in a report, “A World that Counts”, which contains examples of how the data revolution is already improving general quality of life. But where does pharmacy stand? The latest International Pharmacy Journal (vol 33;2) focuses on some of data revolution concepts — crowd-sourced data, real-world and real-time data, big data and data mining — as they relate to pharmacy and pharmaceutical scientists.

Development of pharmacy education around the world through a unique collaboration between the International Pharmaceutical Federation (FIP), University College London School of Pharmacy and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is to continue for a further four years.